Lets talk insurance as a company provided benefit.

SV reX said:

One note on family versus employee only... For a small company, there is a glitch that can cause a lot of trouble for employees with single incomes. The ACA calls for affordable insurance for employees, but my family members are NOT employees, so there is no obligation their coverage be affordable.  I could add them, but my cost would be over $350 per WEEK. For my wife and 1 kid (who have never had health issues). It also disqualifies me for ACA subsidies, because I have "affordable" insurance available to me (though not my family), but make more than the threshold for assistance. 

Wanted to repeat this as I've ran into a similar issue with a proposed plan. The ACA only looks at the payment for one individual employee to determine if coverage is "affordable", so if a family insurance plan would be over $1000 a month, too bad, you've got "affordable" coverage through work and don't qualify for subsidies. So this could drive up the cost of buying a plan through healthcare.gov or a similar state exchange - sometimes by about that same $1000 depending on the employee's income.

So a badly done employee insurance plan can leave employees with fewer options than not having any coverage. If you do offer coverage, make sure it's affordable for someone who's buying it for the whole family.

My employer pays about a third of my total premium for a family plan, according to my paystub. The premium is affordable, but the deductible kinda sucks.

Oh, I remembered something else that is kinda-sorta related to this, but not really: 401k. I'm all about reducing my tax liability one way or another. So if you as an employer are not providing me with a 401k, and you're paying me enough that I can save more than the IRA limits, you're making me pay more in taxes. I wouldn't work for a company that didn't provide a 401k.

Add to that, since you're the boss, you can pay yourself via the 401k as much as $61k (or $66.5k if you're older than 50) that would be tax deferred. (Check with your CPA for the ins and outs of this, but basically, while the employee contribution limit is $20.5k, the employer contribution limit is $40.5k).

mtn said:

Add to that, since you're the boss, you can pay yourself via the 401k as much as $61k (or $66.5k if you're older than 50) that would be tax deferred. (Check with your CPA for the ins and outs of this, but basically, while the employee contribution limit is $20.5k, the employer contribution limit is $40.5k).

I wish I could convince my company to give me my raise only in 401k contributions.

In reply to mtn :

That's a future consideration. I try to make one change at a time and let the dust settle instead of diving off the deep end. 

Well, I got some pricing back from my insurance agent. Expensive is one way to put it. Insanely so. 

In reply to Toyman! :

Yep. It put me out of business. 

Check with your local chamber of commerce. We were able to save a pretty sizable amount by getting a policy - still from a mainline health insurer (Medical Mutual) - with a chamber of commerce membership discount. Your agent may not be able to do it, or maybe they don't know about it. I think the savings was something like 40% for us. It's still a ton of money, but 40% less than an E36 M3 ton.

We pay right around $1400/mo for two employees - one of which is married and has his wife on the policy - no kids on the policy any more they all grew up.

Toyman! said:

Well, I got some pricing back from my insurance agent. Expensive is one way to put it. Insanely so.

DD#1 recently gave me information for this outfit:

imagine360.com - self-funded health plans for employers

Late to the discussion, here's a story on what we're doing at my wife's business.

First, it was extremely useful to us to have our independent insurance agent involved in puzzling out a solution.  Not that there's a lot of choice in insurance providers here in Iowa as Wellmark/BCBS is damn near the only game in town.  They have a lot of different plans though.

There's a significant benefit to getting into a group plan over making an individual plan purchase, so that much is a benefit with no out of pocket cost to the company.

We're set up so that the company makes a $200/month ($100/paycheck, though some months have 3 paychecks, so that gets worked around) to each full time employee for purchase of health insurance-  for themselves or for themselves and spouse/family.  The employee selects one of a couple of plans (how many we can offer is a function of the size of the group) and they pay the remainder as a pre-tax payroll deduction.   Being able to make a pre-tax payroll deduction is also a no out of pocket to the business benefit.  One of the plans is also a high deductible plan so the employee can do an HSA.

Premiums are a function of age, so for younger employees, the $200/month is a pretty good portion of the premium for an individual.  As you get older less so, but still, it matters.

Yes, this can screw up someone for marketplace coverage, but this is Iowa and flounder flounder flounder flounder.

We've also just found out recently that though we're too small to have to offer COBRA to an employee, if we offer an extended leave of absence to an employee, we do have to keep them in the group for up to 9 months with them paying the entire premium, which can raise the group rates if say, the extended leave of absense is for expensive health reasons.  Flounder flounder flounder etc.

There are also regulations about how seen you have to offer insurance after start of employment, etc.  So it's really good to have an agent that can walk you through all this.  Also be clear about what your agent might do as far as roll-out, plan selection, paperwork, etc versus what lands in your lap.

A bunch of folks covered the finer points, but I will say that the benefits matter to the employee. As annoyed as I can become with my current employer at times, they have great benefits, at a very reasonable cost to me.  If I was considering going somewhere else (I'm not), the benefits would more than likely keep me here.

For my 7 year old son, it's enabled him to get awesome speech therapy for the past two years during the pandemic at a very low cost. It's enabled me to see a naturopath to figure out a better diet and avoid long-term medication.  I've purchased exercise equipment for my family to use that the company has paid for (up to $500 a year for 2022), and I can earn significant discounts on my health insurance rates by participating in a few healthy activities over the course of the year. I work for a huge company, so these benefits are not typical, but they have impacted our lives in a positive way. 
 

One strategy may be to roll out the benefits over time, trying to add something new every year or every few years. That would reduce the sticker shock of doing it all at once, but still showing your employee you care about them.

Dusterbd13-michael said:

My company pays half of my insurance as a nonsmoker. No family portion. Also a portion of life,dental, and vision. 

same here.. and I work for a super big corp.  MGM Entertainment.

mad_machine said:

Dusterbd13-michael said:

My company pays half of my insurance as a nonsmoker. No family portion. Also a portion of life,dental, and vision. 

same here.. and I work for a super big corp.  MGM Entertainment.

The agent is currently breaking the pricing down per person. There is no way I can afford to pay 100% of the coverage. $80k is a pretty big hit.

I'm going to have to do some more shopping as well. 

Toyman! said:

mad_machine said:

Dusterbd13-michael said:

My company pays half of my insurance as a nonsmoker. No family portion. Also a portion of life,dental, and vision. 

same here.. and I work for a super big corp.  MGM Entertainment.

The agent is currently breaking the pricing down per person. There is no way I can afford to pay 100% of the coverage. $80k is a pretty big hit.

I'm going to have to do some more shopping as well. 

To the tune of On Top of Old Smokey:

We can't afford healthcare
Premiums are too high
Deductibles will kill us
Its cheaper too die

The system is broken
We can't afford this
The owner is comfy 
But he sure ain't rich

He's trying to help us
Help us get by
But he can't afford healthcare
And neither can I

The system is broken
Berked up you see
Berk the insurance executives
Up their butt with a tree
 

I digress. Definitely shop around. My FIL sells group insurance. About 7 years or so ago, he called every single one of his clients to apologize for the price being so high. 20 years ago, he was making bank, and the insurance was affordable. Nowadays, he might make $25k a year selling the group insurance, and makes the rest of his income off of selling medicare supplemental plans.

I'll chip in that my wife's clinic provides vision and dental at no cost to the employee.  As defined benefit plans, the cost on those is not particularly high-- though the cost will vary depending on what level of benefit your are providing.

In reply to mtn :

It's not just the insurance companies. The medical industry is making money hand over fist. Listening to hospital execs and facilities management talk about how they have to spend hundreds of millions of dollars per year so they don't show a profit is eye-opening. Listening to doctors figure out how to bill for their services as well as tacking their buddies on the invoice for "consults" is pretty eye-opening as well. They are not in it for your health or to help you. They aren't heroes, they are as mercenary as a used car salesman. Maybe more so, because they are the ones holding your health at ransom. 

I don't mind a reasonable profit, but medical professionals are berkeleying everyone. All of them. Want to send a medical professional through the roof, question their prices. They don't even know how to respond. Ask them what the cash price is. Half the time they won't tell you because they want to play the shell game with the insurance. Step one to correcting the problem is requiring all medical businesses to publish all of their pricing for everyone to see. Without that, BOHICA.

I agree the system is berkeleyed.  

I'm currently dating a doctor.  A view on the inside is eye opening.  What Toyman says above does happen, although I don't think healthcare professionals are evil or malicious.  The system is configured/has evolved to encourage the behavior that is happening.  Additionally, my brief view on the inside is that things are often horribly inefficient, but there really isn't an incentive to improve.

In reply to Toyman! :

Careful with the broad brush of medical professionals. That would include nurses who are criminally underpaid, as well as Dietitians, like my wife, who quit her job in large part because the pay is E36 M3. 

Doctors... Well, some are, some aren't. Some just have to play the game. My doctor is entirely independent because she refuses to play the game, but she's lucky in that she's stepping into her father's practice.

But hospital admins pulling down Millions in salary, sometimes nearly $18M... That is a gigantic problem. berkeley that noise. How does that improve patient care? Here is the pay for my wife's system (note: I don't believe the hours they provided here). For comparison, my wife was working 60 hours a week making $59k a year in a HCOL area - with a Masters, 12 years of experience, and actually driving significant revenue for the hospital. berkeley that. Oh, and somehow her health benefits for just her were more expensive than adding her to mine AND paying the $125 monthly extra fee because she was offered benefits from her job. 

Sorry. I'm angry right now with a lot of this stuff. 

In reply to mtn :

That rant was in no way aimed at the working people in hospitals or doctor's offices. It's aimed directly at the management, directors, and many of the doctors themselves. They perpetuate the current system because it's good for them, not good for the industry itself.